


Travel Time May Vary

by Azzandra



Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Gen, Time Travel, alternate title: Agatha H. and the Very Unlikely Family Reunion, with apologies to HG Wells
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-10
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-12 14:47:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2113953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Agatha and Krosp are thrown decades into the past, meet the Heterodyne Boys, and have to team up to stop a monster from rampaging through Beetleburg. You know,<i> the usual</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ETA

 

The console on Agatha's lap ticked, rapidly and a bit labored. Krosp leaned over to glare, as one would glare at a kettle of water which refused to boil.

“Well?” he prompted.

“It's still calculating,” Agatha replied, and gently pushed Krosp off. “And looming isn't going to intimidate it into working any faster.”

Krosp snorted, as if the console's insolence was purposeful and aimed at him in particular.

Agatha paid him no mind. She watched the half-ruined equipment carefully, almost afraid it would suffer a disastrous breakdown before it finished its calculations. The mechanical date indicator flipped through numbers, from zero to nine, over and over, like an injured animal running in numeric circles around itself.

Agatha had had to brute-force the console into working again after it was ripped off the larger contraption it had been attached to, and now she feared that her hasty improvisations hadn't really worked. But just as she was about to go at it with her screwdriver again, the ticking changed pitch—lower, less urgent—and the number display started turning over to something discernible as an actual date.

“How far back did it send us?” Krosp asked. Now that it was almost finished, he was suddenly too dignified to lean over and look himself.

“October,” Agatha said, as the numbers representing the day and month finally settled. “And the year is...”

She trailed off. The last four numbers rolled into place. The ticking stopped. The console went dormant.

And Agatha stared with a blank expression at the numbers.

“What?” Krosp asked. “What year?”

Agatha turned the console around and showed Krosp. His whiskers bristled.

“That can't be right,” he said.

“With our luck, yes it can,” Agatha huffed.

“But that means--”

“It sent us almost half a century back in time,” Agatha finished for him.

 

* * *

 

It had started as such a nice day, too.

They'd finally tracked down Doctor Meshach Nebogipfel, the Spark who'd been kidnapping TPU students to serve as his forced labor. The professors didn't much complain about this, of course, but one of the students had escaped to bring back word that Doctor Nebogipfel was building a time machine, and on the list of things which Agatha didn't want to see anybody meddle with, “time” was second only to “consciousness transferal”.

His lair was out in the Wastelands outside Beetleburg, half under the ruins of some old castle.

Zeetha made short work of his genuinely loyal lackeys, Agatha dismantled his clanks easily, and even Krosp did his part by freeing the captive students who hadn't fallen to the Doctor's sparky charisma.

Things could not have gone smoother, and that was when Agatha should have realized that things were about to go very wrong.

Doctor Nebogipfel did not stay to fight. Or at least he didn't intend to. If he'd just gotten into his time machine and left at that very moment, he would have gotten away, and Agatha would have called the whole thing a bust and gone home.

But no. He had to brag, because his invention was just that good, and how would the world know what a genius he was if he didn't tell them, at both great length and volume?

In retrospect, Agatha regretted trying to peacefully knock him out rather than just shooting him, because in the ensuing comical struggle for the time machine's controls (and during the whole spectacle, Agatha could just feel Zeetha's embarrassment from across the room, but in Agatha's defense, Doctor Nebogipfel was a biter), her death ray went off anyway and the machine engaged some sort of emergency protocols.

And the next thing Agatha knew, she was being prodded awake by Krosp in the middle of empty castle ruins. The trees, spring-green when she'd arrived, were now brown-leafed, and the remains of half a time machine were littered around her like the debris from a blast.

 

* * *

 

With boundless optimism, Agatha had assumed that even if the time machine spat them up a few months in the future, or at the very worst a few months in the past, in which case the plan was to hole up somewhere and wait for her past self to suffer the same mishap with Doctor Nebogipfel's time machine before popping up again. The caverns outside Mechanicsburg would have served this purpose well; they were still fully stocked, and nobody would be there to notice them. It would have been sort of like a vacation. She could finally work on a few personal projects she never seemed to have the time for.

But this was an entirely different issue.

Agatha picked up every last piece of the machine that she could find. She was aided by two of her little clanks, which she found after searching her pockets; they tunneled under leaves and searched under low branches more efficiently than she could, and they brought back little pieces, stacking them next to the tree stump the console laid on top of.

Krosp was not helping, because he was busy staring at the console. The tip of his tail swished from side to side nervously as he considered the situation.

“Can you fix it?” he asked quietly.

“There's not enough _to_ fix,” Agatha said, gesturing to the pathetically small pile of parts the clanks had scrounged up. “We got the control console, we didn't get any of the actually useful part! It can tell us the date, and it can tell the time machine where to go, but we're missing the actual time machine!”

“Well, where is it?” Krosp asked.

Agatha huffed and forced herself to think calmly. Going on a rant would be cathartic, but hardly useful.

“When I shot the machine to pieces,” she said, “I must have also hit whatever was shielding the machine against the effects of time dilation. So the question isn't _where_ it is, but when.”

“Are you telling me the time machine is broken up in pieces across time?” Krosp asked.

“Well, yes.” Agatha looked around. “The pieces should turn up in this spot, but I'm not sure when.”

And of course, Doctor Nebogipfel would turn up with it.

She took a few breaths.

“Alright,” she said. “We can't just sit around in the Wasteland with no shelter and no supplies.”

“We can't leave, either,” Krosp pointed out. “We might miss when the pieces come through.”

“No,” Agatha said. She picked up one of her little clanks, opening the back to perform some modifications. With just a few small pieces from the time machine, it would be easy to get the desired result. “I'm leaving behind one of these guys. When something comes through, it's going to send a signal to the other one.”

“Sounds risky,” Krosp said. “If Doctor Nebogipfel comes through with them, he could pick up everything and run.”

“He's not going to do anything without the control panel,” Agatha snorted, before continuing somewhat smugly, “and fixing the time machine is going to take him a while.”

She took a moment to feel galled by how flimsily built the entire thing was. Agatha had met more than a few Sparks who could benefit from learning a thing or two from a blacksmith, but considering that she was the one always going up against these clowns, Agatha supposed she ought to be happy their doomsday devices were so easily breakable.

“At the very least, it'll take him some time to gather up all the pieces,” she said.

“Giving us enough time to get the jump on him,” Krosp concluded. “Convenient. But where, exactly, are we going to go?”

Agatha stopped working.

They were halfway between Beetleburg and Mechanicsburg. Either way was a very long walk, but...

“Not Mechanicsburg,” she said. She could prove that she was a Heterodyne easily, but Mechanicsburg was not yet the mildly menacing tourist trap of Agatha's time.

“Then you might want to take some precautions,” Krosp said, and gestured to her neck.

“...Ah.” Agatha touched the pin.

It wasn't as if Lucrezia was still in her head; it was just a plain trilobite pin. The only thing it did these days was identify her as the Heterodyne. Which, considering what people in this timeframe thought of Heterodynes, would be a very bad thing for her.

But she still hesitated when she took it off and stuffed it into a coat pocket. Even more than when she had to rip off all the trilobite buttons off her coat a few moments later.

 

* * *

 

The console was heavy and unwieldy, but lacking any other option, Agatha picked it up and carried it under her arm. She could have found some hiding spot to stow it, but at this point, it was the last thin thread of hope she had for returning to her proper time, so she was loathe to leave it out of her sight.

The walk through the Wastelands was uneventful. There were strange sounds in the distance, and forest noises which made Krosp's ears twitch, but they reached Beetleburg late in the afternoon.

There were human guards at the gates—not the clockwork soldiers Agatha was used to—but they were very easily swayed to let her into the town when she claimed to be a student who suffered some vaguely-described mishap out in the Wastelands. They looked at the banged-up console with knowing smirks, and waved her and Krosp through. The number of students who returned limping and humiliated to Beetleburg each week tended to be exceeded only by the number of students who were never seen again.

Walking into Beetleburg was... strange.

She was familiar with her childhood town, and it had not changed in anything but details over the years, even in the four decades stretching out between her childhood and this day. But her memories before she took off the locket were always a bit blurry along the edges, a bit washed-out and hushed. She remembered the Beetleburg of her childhood in nothing but contrasting shadows and lights, and now it was as if she was seeing it overlaid with colors.

She never realized how vibrant and busy Beetleburg could be. Brighter and louder, and yet paradoxically far less overwhelming to her senses now that her mind was no longer hampered.

She inhaled—the smells were exactly the same—and this was what finally filled her with homesickness and a sort of aching sadness, because now she remembered being young, inadequate, _defective_ Agatha Clay, and she swayed on her feet with the revelation of how different she was now.

She was jostled out of it by Krosp tugging on her coat.

“I'm hungry,” he said, clearly meaning that Agatha should make solving that issue the priority.

“We need to go to the market anyway,” she said.

Not the Thieves' Market yet, she decided, though she wanted to go poke around there anyway, in case by some stroke of luck more pieces of the time machine had popped up earlier and been picked up.

But there were other markets, and Agatha remembered them from all the occasions she'd accompanied Lilith on shopping trips. The nearest one would be just a few streets away.

Her feet carried her almost senselessly while she drank in the sights of Beetleburg. The differences were often just as fascinating as the things that stayed the same. The street lights were not even gaslamps yet, but the old phosphorescent beetle kind that the old folks of Beetleburg would reminisce about. She could see them crawl around in their glass enclosures on top of thin wrought iron poles. The cobbles on the roads were different in shape and pattern, newly paved for now, and Agatha could swear she could feel the difference in the soles of her feet. And most notably, there was no Clockwork Army yet, but she could see prototypes patrolling the streets, shiny, new, yet archaic looking fighting machines that were unmistakably Doctor Beetle's work.

He'd be young now, wouldn't he? In his thirties, at the most.

It was this strange thought, of a young Doctor Beetle, that distracted Agatha from noticing she was already at the market and staring blankly at the colorful wares displayed.

There was the smell of someone frying fish nearby. Krosp was licking his lips, an intent look on his face as he watched a vendor stick little three-eyed fish on sticks and hawk them off to passers-by.

Even Agatha's stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn't eaten since breakfast, and that was over forty years off.

“The fish?” she asked.

“Without the stick, please,” Krosp continued. “It would only slow me down.”

Agatha rolled her eyes, and checked to see how much it would cost.

But as she tried to make sense of the numbers on the placard—there was no way fish on a stick cost _that much_ —she realized the annotations next to the numbers made no sense to her.

She looked around more carefully. Money was exchanging hands everywhere around her, but she now noticed it looked completely wrong, even from afar.

Someone held out a bright red bill to pay for something. Since the vendor was still adjusting his scales and not ready to take it yet, this gave Agatha the time needed to take a closer look at the money. It was emblazoned with the seal of the House of Sturdza.

Agatha's heart sunk as she realized these banknotes were Romanian lions—a currency which had fallen into disuse under the Wulfenbach Empire, when it was replaced by Pax-Guilders at the Baron's behest. This presented an obvious problem when all the money Agatha even _had_ was in Pax-Guilders.

She should have foreseen this particular complication, but she'd been too taken with the sights of Beetleburg to fully consider what traveling so far back even meant.

She explained the problem to Krosp, who did not take his eye off the fish. He stayed staring at them for so long, that at first, Agatha thought maybe he hadn't heard her.

Eventually he sighed, shoulders slumping in defeat.

“Alright then,” he said, finally turning towards Agatha. “Strategy meeting.”

He marched Agatha out of the market. There was an alley off the entrance to the market, and they ducked into it to get off the street. It was stacked with crates of junk.

“How careful do we have to be?” Krosp asked. “We're not going to, I don't know, erase ourselves from history by stepping on a butterfly, are we?”

“Stepping on a--” Agatha's eyebrow rose. “No! That's... a really weird thing to ask.”

Agatha curiously took the lid off of one of the crates and peered inside. Krosp sighed heavily, but followed suit. It looked like construction debris. At least there was nothing disgusting inside. Even Agatha would have drawn the line at anything that _squelched_.

“We're safe, I think,” she continued, rummaging through the crate. “Doctor Nebogipfel seemed to think that the act of traveling to the past itself would create an alternate course, parallel to that of the time traveler's original timeline. We're effectively in a different universe, one that we created just by being here. Didn't you listen to his rant?”

“I actively try to block out that sort of thing. But did you just say now we're not just in a different time, we're in a _completely different universe_?” Krosp asked, alarmed. “Isn't that going to make returning more difficult?”

“It's actually going to make it easier,” Agatha said. “We don't need to worry as much about tampering with our own future.”

“So we can do whatever we want?” Krosp asked.

“We're in an alley rooting through the garbage,” Agatha sighed. “Is that really what we want?”

“Point taken.” A mimmoth sprang out from under a broken piece of wood. Krosp caught it and scarfed it down. Agatha pretended not to hear the crunching.

“But as for any other kind of tampering, that's risky,” Agatha continued. “Once we change something, we can't exactly undo it, so it's better we don't... do anything hasty.”

“Like prevent the Other from devastating Europa?” Krosp suggested.

Agatha sighed and hung her head, hair falling to hide her face.

“We could make things worse,” she said finally.

“Or better?” Krosp suggested.

“It's not like I'm not thinking about it,” Agatha said. “But it's something we shouldn't consider until after we have the time machine and actually figure out how it works. There might be issues we're not even aware of yet.”

Agatha found a length of tarp, dirty and ripped, but still enough of it intact for her purposes. She cut off two long strips off the tarp with a pair of wire cutters she happened to have. After wrapping the console in the larger piece of the tarp, she wrapped the two strips around to tie it closed. Agatha knew that, logically, nobody could guess the console's origin or purpose just by looking at it, but it still made her feel nervous when people actually saw it, as if at any moment someone might dramatically point at her and go 'a-ha! Time traveler!'

Krosp could not find anything useful in the garbage, nor any other edible critter, so he gave up.

“What do we have that we can trade?” he asked.

Agatha checked her pockets; a number of tools, a few stray gears and springs, a piece of hard candy which she'd forgotten about and which Krosp claimed for himself, a lot of loose paper with notes and calculations, an iron cast hydraulic pen and, for unclear reasons, a handful of beans at the bottom of her pocket.

“How much do you think you could get for the tools?” Krosp asked, while sniffing at the beans.

Agatha balked.

“I need those!” she said.

“You can get new tools later,” Krosp said, “but only if you don't die from hunger first.”

Agatha sighed heavily.

“Or maybe your death ray could fetch a nice price--”

“Absolutely not!” Agatha snapped, hand going to the inner pocket where she'd stashed the item in question. “We'd be practically defenseless.”

“You can't solve all of your problems with death rays,” Krosp said reasonably.

“Or maybe I need to solve _more_ of my problems with death rays,” Agatha muttered in response, thinking back on how this entire adventure could have been nipped in the bud if she'd just shot Doctor Nebogipfel.

A door opened out into the alley, and a burly man wearing an apron stepped out, glaring at them.

“Hey! What do you think you're doing here?!” he shouted, and produced a length of pipe, which he waved threateningly.

“Maybe not _this_ problem, though,” Agatha said, and, grabbing Krosp by the back of his coat, promptly absconded with him.

Agatha didn't run for long, but when she skidded to a halt, with Krosp now clinging to her shoulder and the console feeling incredibly heavy under her other arm, she realized with a start that they were on Forge Street.

She hadn't... She didn't _think_ about it beforehand, it was just where she ended up.

She let Krosp down and trotted down the street, but when she turned the usual corner, there was no familiar Clay Mechanical sign to greet her. There was no logical reason for it to be there, either, and yet she felt oddly disappointed.

It was getting dark. The street lights were flickering on one by one, casting everything in yellow-green beetle-wing light. It was getting colder, too, the nip of autumn weather more noticeable now, and making Agatha regret pulling all those buttons off her coat.

The streets were not quite empty yet, but the crowds were thinning. People were hurrying home, and a lot of the workshops were starting to bank their fires for the day.

Agatha was still hungry, and they still hadn't found a place to sleep, but at least she was not as unhappy about it as Krosp, who pointedly muttered about not wanting to sleep in the cold.

“We'll just have find an inn,” Agatha said. “Maybe they'll let us sleep in the stable if we offer to pay them back in labor. I'm sure they'll have something that needs fixing, and there might even be a warm meal in it for us if we play our cards right.”

Krosp was begrudging—he could already see this course of action would end with him shoveling dung—but he had to admit that was as good a plan as they had. One that, Krosp noticed, also allowed Agatha to keep her tools.

So they set out with renewed optimism to search for an inn, and this lasted for only about thirty seconds before something _else_ went wrong.

A cold wind picked up, and Agatha pulled her coat closed, but something in the mood around her changed.

The street grew hushed and tense, and Agatha looked up to see strange lights playing in the air, like transparent gauzy curtains in the breeze, their color only visible as they folded over themselves.

This wasn't aurora borealis, Agatha told herself. You couldn't see the aurora borealis at this latitude, and other than the fact that it appeared much too close to the ground, it lasted for less of a minute before the colors snuffed out of their own accord.

Strangely, the tension only seemed to mount. People were retreating along the walls and inside shops, watching tensely for something.

“These people are afraid of something,” Krosp said.

“I noticed,” Agatha said, because it was hard not to. She turned to someone nearby, intending to ask what it was, but she only got as far as “Excuse me.”

There was a deafening crash of metal. At the same time, the console was wrenched out of Agatha's grasp from behind, so suddenly she didn't even have time to react.

She turned on her feet, ready to fight, hand already reaching to her death ray--

A great metallic beast towered over the streets, the top of its head as high as the tallest house. And it really was a beast, not a clank, because while it was made of metal items, they were mashed together in a rough shape—legs, arms, a head so flat it disappeared into the chest—not attached so much as held together. A boiler, an engine, half of a crushed clockwork soldier, several lamp posts, an iron gate and numerous other unidentifiable chunks of metal made up the creature, all in a haphazard mess.

And Agatha spotted the console as well, still covered in the dirty tarp, pinned to the side of the monster's chest.

“Just once,” she sighed, “I'd like to have a one-disaster kind of day.”

“That's not a clank, is it?” Krosp asked.

“My guess is giant magnet monster,” Agatha replied, and then pushed her glasses back into place. They slipped down her nose slightly as the metal wire in them was tugged by whatever magnetic phenomenon was taking place. The tools stashed throughout her coat's pockets were tugged too, and it felt strange, but none of them weighed enough, even put together, to escape Agatha's coat, and soon enough the creature's magnetic pull died out.

The creature took a step that rattled every window on the street, then another. People were starting to run scared, now that they knew which way was opposite the monster, and Agatha found herself elbowed out of the way quite rudely as she held her ground.

As Agatha and Krosp were left alone in the street, the monster looked down on them, crouched to the ground on all fours, and--

It roared, Agatha supposed. A hole appeared in the rough region of its head. A grinding, metallic sound was emitted, like the screech you could hear when two clanks crashed against each other.

There was no way that was a friendly sound, Agatha decided. She pulled out her death ray and she shot at the creature's leg.

The beam dispersed, running off the creature's leg like water and making about as much of a dent.

“I knew I should have brought a bigger one,” Agatha muttered. But a bigger gun wouldn't have changed the fact that she needed to save the console before she did anything too destructive to the monster.

She jumped out of the way as the monster swung its arm at her.

Krosp scattered in the opposite direction, disappearing down an alley between two buildings.

Agatha dodged effortlessly out of the way of the monster. It was big, but slow and encumbered by its own large, uneven limbs. It tottered angrily towards her, like a drunk wind-up toy, and swung without much method.

But it was making it very hard to work on a solution while having to constantly move around.

“Krosp, distract it!” Agatha yelled.

“What do you want me to do?” the cat's voice came in return.

“I don't care if you dance a jig, just keep it busy!” Agatha replied. “And don't get squashed!”

As the creature reared to crush her with both arms at once, Agatha crouched and lunged swiftly between its legs, ending up behind it.

The monster was confused, raising its fists to look for Agatha's bloody remains and finding none. It stopped its rampage momentarily in confusion, but then Krosp jumped out and hit it with a broomstick.

Alright, well, at least Krosp used a weapon, sort of, thought Agatha. The monster obviously wasn't injured, but it was annoyed, and had now switched its focus to Krosp. He whacked it a few more times with the broom, and then had to abandon it as he jumped out of the way of the monster's fists.

Agatha worked fast, full-tilt Spark-induced fugue and adrenaline carrying her. She dismantled her death ray, took out the power core and reconfigured the innards of the weapon into something more useful.

Once she was done, Agatha slipped the power core in and jumped back into the fray.

Climbing the monster's back was easy—it was uneven enough that it offered her a lot of foot holds.

She reached the great hump of its back before it even noticed her, but it did notice her. Forgetting all about Krosp, it swung its great arms overhead, its fists crashing into its own back as it tried to hit Agatha.

Agatha moved fast between the creature's fists, yelping as she swung out of the way of each hit, frantically grabbing onto new handholds as quickly as she could find them. This was utterly terrifying and she would never complain about Zeetha's agility training ever again. Not out loud, at least.

In its wild, frantic swinging, the monster teetered in place and swung around blindly, and it was mostly by happenstance that it crashed a storefront with its elbow. Agatha was rattled by the impact, but not as much as she was alarmed by the shriek she heard.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the hapless townsman caught between the monster and the debris of his own shop.

Agatha realized that she was not going to reach the console before the monster crushed someone, either accidentally or on purpose.

She swung herself up as high as she could, and when the monster opened its makeshift maw for a roar, she threw down its throat the modified death ray.

The monster stumbled back in startlement as the death ray clanged its way down, and Agatha jumped away.

There was no boom, not even a pop, but the monster stiffened and shook as if electrocuted, and Agatha knew her makeshift demagnetization grenade had gone off.

The monster doubled down as if afflicted with a sudden case of indigestion, and its roar came out in pained chugs this time.

In truth, Agatha had no idea what it would do to it. Given how her day had gone thus far, however, she was putting her money on “make it angrier”, and thus when she jumped down, the first thing she did was pull the townsman out of the wreckage.

“Run,” she growled at him, and if the monster wasn't convincing enough, the harmonics of Agatha's voice were more than enough to make up anyone's mind.

The townsman complied, scurrying away as quickly as possible.

Agatha turned back towards the monster, and in one jerky motion, it turned towards her. It still looked like a pile of junk metal, the grenade having done no visible damage at all, except now it looked like a decidedly _angrier_ pile of junk metal.

Agatha wasn't sure when, exactly, but the sun had set sometime during the fight, and the darkness was making it obvious that the inside of the monster's chest glowed an acid green. She could glimpse the light shifting between metal parts, but she couldn't see what was giving it off. She was intrigued, now. The metal was only the outer shell, a protection for the true creature animating it. Agatha wondered, with scientific curiosity, what she would see once she pried loose all the pieces.

The monster seemed to be rearing for another assault. It crouched down as if preparing itself, its body language indistinct in the darkness, but still threatening.

“Fine!” Agatha hissed, shaking her fist at it. “You want another go at me? Just try me!”

Her temples throbbed. She was perhaps a bit too deeply in the madness to think right, and she wasn't even completely sure what she was going to do once the monster charged her, except she was going to think of _something_ \--

Light flooded the street, from somewhere behind Agatha, as bright as the sun, bringing the monster into clear view.

“Now, now, Miss, don't hog the monster!” a voice rang out, cheerful.

“We want our turn too!” a second joined in.

“By which my brother means--”

“Duck!”

Agatha did so, and felt the 'whoosh' as a projectile shot over her head. Once it hit the monster, it exploded into a yellowish-white cloud.

The monster batted at it, and the cloud turned out to be, in fact, quite solid. A second and third projectile joined the first, and soon, all the monster's limbs were covered in the stuff. It howled and raged, but found itself unable to move, and toppled over.

Agatha climbed to her feet, wincing at the noise. When it reached certain screeching pitches, it was like nails on a chalkboard.

“What's the density on that foam?” Agatha asked, slightly worried, and then turned to look at the fortuitous new arrivals. She squinted against the light of their lamp.

“It's our own special blend,” one of them replied, chipper and reassuring.

“Don't worry, it'll hold,” the second said, sounding younger, but just as confident.

The light was turned down, enough so Agatha was at least not blinded by it. It seemed to be produced by a type of clank, shaped something like a lizard, but with great mirrored eyes like flashlights. Its light faded as a crank on the side of its head was turned. Agatha could finally get a better look at the fortuitous new arrivals. She walked up to them, about to thank them.

But as she blinked and the two figures came into focus, Agatha realized that their faces were both eerily familiar to her.

And how could they not be? How many years did Agatha spend staring at the portraits inside her locket? How could she not recognize her father, even standing before her as a young man?

Bill Heterodyne, looking like nothing more than a teenage boy, slicked his dark hair back and gave Agatha a roguish grin.

“I hope you're not hurt, Miss,” he said.

Agatha looked down at the lapels of his shirt, at the two trilobites embroidered on them, and then at the trilobite on the lighting clank. Bill's grin wavered a bit, but he stuck his chest out proudly, even though being identified as a Heterodyne in this time period probably meant something completely different than in Agatha's time.

Then she turned to Barry Heterodyne and, again, there was a surreal moment of recognition. Almost Uncle Barry's face, but younger, rounder with baby-fat, uncreased by worries. So, so young.

He was tinkering with the foam cannon, unjamming the trigger mechanism, by the looks of it, and he looked up (up at her, because he was shorter, still not fully grown), and then down at the trilobite on the cannon, knowing it identified him clearly and perhaps anticipating a negative reaction.

“Hello,” Barry said, gathering himself up and smiling. “Barry Heterodyne. And my brother, Bill.” He pointed his screwdriver to Bill, who nodded and slicked his hair back again, but more nervously this time.

This, at least, spurred Agatha out of her shock. She hoped she hadn't looked too pole-axed just a second ago, and very slowly, she held her hand out towards Bill.

“Agatha Clay,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”

They both beamed at her, and rushed to shake her hand, as if fearing she'd change her mind at any moment. They looked so happy, even not really knowing who she was, that Agatha found herself smiling in return. Her day could not get weirder, and there was a certain comfort in that.

“There you are!” Krosp said as he walked up to her. Bill and Barry looked at each other, and then down at Krosp in interest.

“Krosp! Are you okay?” Agatha asked, feeling just slightly guilty that she'd forgotten all about him.

“Me?! You're the one who was wrangling that iron behemoth a few minutes ago!” Krosp replied. 'Annoyed' was as close as he was going to get to 'concerned', it seemed.

Bill crouched down slightly and offered his hand to Krosp.

“Hello! Bill Heterodyne,” he introduced himself, “and my brother Barry.”

Krosp looked at Bill with naked shock, and then turned the same gaze upon Barry. This, at least, was a reaction the Heterodyne Boys seemed to be expecting. They smiled, projecting an air of harmlessness that would have put baby chicks to shame.

“Agatha,” Krosp hissed out of the corner of his mouth.

“This is Krosp,” Agatha said, before Krosp could continue and say something she was going to have a hard time explaining.

Krosp pulled himself up regally, tilting his head up.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said stiffly. “Now, Agatha--”

“The console!” Agatha smacked her forehead. “Nearly forgot about that.” Though for understandable reasons, she thought, throwing furtive look to Bill and Barry.

“Yes, that,” Krosp said. “The glowing can't be a good sign.”

“Glowing?”

Agatha, as well as Bill and Barry, all turned towards the monster. It was, indeed, glowing, an incandescent blue, different from the green of before. And though it still couldn't move, Agatha could swear it turned its head towards them to give one last, smug look—

Before it disappeared in a flash, leaving behind only its indent in empty foam.

There were ten seconds of stunned silence. Barry was the first to break it.

“But on the bright side, we know how it got away from us the last time!”

 


	2. New Friends, Old Acquaintances

“How?” Agatha asked, pacing. “How did it do that?”

“An interesting question,” Bill said, helping the lighting clank scramble up the foam cast so it could light up the inside. Predictably, it was empty, and the monster had left nothing behind.

“But you said you know how it got away from you last time,” Agatha said, turning to Barry.

“We didn't see it actually vanish last time,” Barry said, shrugging. “It just rounded the corner, we ran after and poof, it was already gone.

“Hoo, boy, that was a hard one to explain to the constables, when we came skidding around the corner and bumped right into them carrying a hand-cannon,” Bill said, and shook his head.

“Not to mention a bit embarrassing,” Barry said. “It's a big monster, right? How do you lose that sort of thing in the middle of town?”

“Well, not to say it isn't _possible_ ,” Bill trailed off.

“Oh, right. Great-great-great-granduncle Domitian's mammoth,” Barry said, catching his brother's meaning. “Except I don't think we'll find it in the sewing room this time.”

Agatha rubbed her forehead, only half-listening as she stared at the foam.

“But this thing is going to pop up again, right?” she asked.

“That's what we'll be watching for,” Barry said.

“We need to find it,” Agatha said. “Krosp and me, I mean. The monster has something of ours.”

“Well, this is wonderful!” Bill said, turning his brightest smile on Agatha. “We were just going out to meet a friend for dinner and discuss ways of capturing it anyway! Miss Clay, you should come along.”

Agatha was taken aback by the invitation, and shared a look with Krosp, but there really wasn't anything stopping them from accepting the offer except for the strangeness of the situation. They needed all the help they could get.

“Bill,” Barry said, noticing Agatha's hesitation, “they might have somewhere else to be.” He smiled apologetically to Krosp and Agatha. “We wouldn't want to impose.”

Bill's expression grew more serious, and he nodded.

“I'm sorry, Barry's right,” he said.

“No! It's not that,” Agatha said quickly. “But we only just arrived in town today, and we don't have any money.”

“That's all the better reason to accept a dinner invitation,” Krosp said.

“He's right!” Bill said. “Dinner's on us! If you want to, that is. We understand if you can't accept.”

“Nonsense, of course we accept,” Krosp replied, grinning widely in anticipation.

“ _Thank you,_ is what Krosp meant by that,” Agatha said.

“I prefer to express my gratitude in eating,” Krosp said. “Now show us to the food.” He made an imperious gesture as he said this.

Bill and Barry grinned in response, which Krosp bore with dignity.

“We really should get going,” Barry said. “We're already kind of late.”

“Ah, of course,” Bill said, fumbling for a pocketwatch and wincing when he noticed the time.

Barry broke down the foam using a flask of chemicals, and soon enough, the entire thing was reduced to a frothy white liquid on the street, looking like nothing more than soap water.

“Perfectly harmless,” Bill said. “It'll wash away with the next rain.”

Then they disassembled the foam cannon and packed it up in a canvas bag. Once this was done, Bill prodded the lizard clank. It turned its luminous eyes off and, with some reluctance, climbed into the back as well, fitting itself over the pieces of the foam cannon and shutting down.

Bill closed the bag and hoisted it over his shoulder, trying to make it look like he wasn't straining under its weight. By the way Barry rolled his eyes behind Bill's back, Agatha guessed Bill's main motivation was to impress the girl. Since the girl in question often trained by running with anvils for miles, and was unbeknownst to Bill also his daughter, he was less than successful, and he could probably tell by Agatha's deadpan expression. But at least he bore his failure with good cheer.

“Where is it that we're going, exactly?” Agatha asked as they set out.

“The Bishop Inn,” Bill replied. “Hope that's alright, it's... kind of Sparky.”

 

* * *

 

What Bill meant turned out to be, in fact, that only Sparks ever went there. Agatha wasn't aware of the existence of The Bishop Inn back in her time, but considering how unsustainable an establishment providing alcohol to Sparks sounded, she wasn't terribly surprised. If it had existed, she suspected it would have been the kind of place Lilith would have strongly discouraged Agatha from even approaching.

She eyed the sign hanging outside the door. It was slightly scorched, but painted with a white bishop chess piece on a checkered background, getting struck by lightning. Yes, definitely kind of Sparky.

The inside of The Bishop Inn was a surprise as well. Unlike any tavern Agatha had ever visited, this one was brightly lit, walls covered by blackboards with calculations and sketches scribbled in chalk. The tables were heavily reinforced and bolted to the ground, and the tablecloths were white, but cheaply made by the looks of it. Since Agatha spotted several being actively written on in an excess of zeal, she guessed the reason was so that it wouldn't be much of a loss once the customer finished writing out their notes and decided to take them away.

The bar area looked fairly solidly armored, both against explosions and weaponry, and Agatha couldn't spot a single breakable glass or container. Decorations were close to nonexistent, and by the looks of it, everything in the bar was either built to be blast-proof or cheap enough to be easily replaced.

It seemed to be a relatively busy night, and the clientele was of the ranting set, so it was as loud and overheated as any tavern would be around this time of evening. But there was a curious dip in the noise level as their entrance was noted. Heads turned, curious and mistrustful.

They had to be looking at the Heterodyne Boys, but Bill and Barry ignored them completely as they looked around.

A middle-aged man, his hairline receding but the rest of his hair wild, intercepted them at the door. He wore a white apron, but it was stained by machine oil, and he had a tool belt cinched over it.

“Ah!” the man clapped his hands together. “You've arrived. Master Wulfenbach has been waiting for you.”

“Thank you, Master Basmandi,” Bill replied.

That was all the advance warning Agatha had that the friend they were meeting was most likely Klaus Wulfenbach. She hid her surprise as well as she could, but looking down, she could see Krosp's ears twitch nervously.

Then the man Bill called Master Basmandi turned to Agatha and bowed. He had a nervous habit of tapping the tips of his fingers together constantly, which made him look like some manner of fidgety bug.

“But you have not been here before! Welcome to The Bishop Inn. I am the long-suffering proprietor, and you may know me as Rizmo Basmandi.”

Agatha introduced herself and Krosp in turn.

“I trust you've been informed as to the nature of this establishment?” the man continued, his eyes sliding over to Bill and Barry speculatively.

The boys looked insulted that he'd even ask.

“Of course we did!” Bill said.

“I think I would have noticed even if they hadn't,” Agatha said, gesturing to the room. Her gaze fell on something in the back. “...Are they building a double-acting vitruvian aeolipile engine in the corner there?”

Master Basmandi's eyes widened. He looked to the back, where two Sparks were not only building said item, but were actively trying to use their hot coffee as fuel for it.

“Aaaah, well spotted! I see now that you too have scientific inclinations,” he said, which was the politest way anyone had ever called Agatha a madgirl, and she had to give him credit for that. “Forgive me, I have often had to explain to customers why this is not an ideal locale for bringing a date.”

“I am not anyone's date!” Agatha sputtered.

“This isn't a date!” Bill sputtered at the same time.

Barry stayed silent, but his ears turned red.

Master Basmandi bowed his head.

“Of course not. I find myself apologizing again.” His eyes slid to Krosp next, and the corner of his mouth tugged down in mild disapproval. “Of course, people do not often bring their constructs here, either.”

Krosp leveled a glare at the innkeeper, and his tail puffed up as he bristled.

“I'm sure Krosp will be perfectly safe in your establishment,” Agatha said, tone bordering on icy.

At the very least, Master Basmandi had enough sense to recognize the 'or else' implied.

“Of course, of course.” There was a small explosion at that point, and he ran off to deal with it.

“Sorry about that, Miss Clay,” Bill said. “Master Basmandi means well. Mostly.”

“It's fine,” she shrugged. And after a moment she added, “You can call me Agatha.”

Before Bill could say anything else, Barry nudged him.

“There's Klaus!”

If Klaus minded the wait, he showed no signs of it. He was seated in a booth off by one wall, nursing a mug of coffee while frowning thoughtfully at a stack of papers in his hand. He didn't even notice them until Bill and Barry sat across the table from him and Agatha had to take the seat next to him. Krosp hopped up on the bench next to Agatha.

Klaus looked up from the papers, startled by the new arrivals. He was young too, though a few years older than Bill and Barry, and much closer to Agatha's age. His hair was a rich golden brown, same shade as Gil's. Still tall, even standing down, and broad-shouldered, but not the same man who carried the weight of an empire on his shoulders. Not the Baron, Agatha told herself. Not even _a_ Baron, yet. There was nothing to hold against young Klaus Wulfenbach, and no reason to be intimidated by him. Agatha tried hard to remember that.

“Klaus, this is Agatha Clay,” Bill said, before Klaus could even ask, “and her friend Krosp. Agatha, this is Klaus Wulfenbach.”

“She was fighting the magnet monster,” Barry told Klaus, sounding just the slightest bit awed. “She's very spry.” Then Barry smiled at her.

Agatha felt a bit of a blush creep across her face, because she hadn't really accomplished much during that fight, but even this much praise from... from not-really-yet-Uncle Barry was touching, in some strange way she couldn't fully grasp.

Klaus blinked, taken aback.

“Ah, a pleasure to meet you, Miss Clay,” he said, shaking Agatha's hand.

He gave an uncertain look to Krosp, but the cat was grooming himself and pointedly ignoring Klaus, and Klaus had no idea what to make of a cat in a coat.

“When was it this happened, exactly?” Klaus asked the last question while glancing to Bill.

“Just earlier,” Bill replied, not really paying attention to Klaus. He leaned over the plucked the papers from his hand, going over it. “Oh good! You found the notes we left for you! Did you go over them?”

“Yes,” Klaus said, “and I think I spent almost as much time trying to parse your awful handwriting as I did trying to put the pages in order.”

“But what did you think about our ideas?” Barry asked.

“Most of them seem workable,” Klaus said.

“Really?” Bill said, spreading the papers in front of him. “After page twelve, it felt like we really started reaching.”

“Which, by your count, is page twelve?” Klaus asked.

Bill and Barry pointed to completely different pages. Klaus raised an eyebrow.

“We, er, finished writing on one side,” Bill explained, “and we didn't want to go get more paper, so we started writing on the other side. We might have flubbed the order a bit, though.”

“Yes, a bit,” Klaus said, a note of humor in his voice.

Agatha had leaned over to read the notes upside down, but she was intrigued enough that she couldn't resist taking a few pages for a closer look.

“This is how you plan to catch the monster?” she asked, scanning the pages.

“Just a few ideas we sketched out,” Bill said.

Agatha was intrigued, to say the least. She could already see how she could improve on their ideas—not that they were bad, quite the opposite. Good Sparkwork tended to be inspiring to other Sparks, and Agatha could feel her mind roiling with ideas just by glancing at the pages.

She produced the pen from her pocket and dashed off a few things on the margins. They were working with some outmoded concepts, and Agatha had the benefit of over four extra decades of technological innovations to draw from. She didn't realize how reckless revealing such knowledge was until she'd already crammed every empty space on two pages with her own annotations.

She froze in mid-word, noticing that Bill and Barry were leaned out of their seats and halfway across the table watching her, and that Klaus was peering over her shoulder with intense interest. When she stopped so abruptly, they all looked at her, bewildered.

“I'm sorry, this is probably rude of me,” Agatha said, putting the pen down. “I shouldn't be meddling in your work.”

“No!” Bill and Barry said at the same time, giving her identical wide-eyed looks.

“Please meddle!” Bill continued. “We insist!”

“Miss Clay, you're not a student at the University, are you?” Klaus asked, picking up the pages and taking a closer look. Agatha felt a pang of worry for it, but she didn't think she'd revealed anything about her style that could reveal her as Heterodyne.

“No,”Agatha replied.

“Why not? You're brilliant!” Barry said, and then turned red and sunk in his seat, embarrassed by his own outburst.

“I used to be a student,” she replied, not sure she ought to be revealing even that much. “There was an... incident. I didn't get to graduate.”

She realized belatedly that she might have just opened herself to some very awkward questions, but Bill merely passed her another page.

“What do you think about this one?” he asked.

Agatha looked at the page. She picked up the pen again.

“Intriguing design,” she said, “but I think there's a more efficient way to distribute the power relays...”

She began sketching out a new layout, but Krosp gave her an exasperated look.

“Are you going to be at this all night?” Krosp asked Agatha. “I was promised dinner.”

Klaus was startled.

“The cat talks,” he said, then became flustered at having said something so obvious.

Krosp harrumphed.

“The cat also starves,” he said. “Where's the food?”

Agatha sighed at Krosp.

“We _did_ promise them dinner,” Bill said, giving Klaus an apologetic smile.

“Ah, of course,” Klaus said. “I've only had coffee all evening, I wouldn't mind dinner either.”

Bill waved Master Basmandi over.

“Just keep in mind,” Bill said to Agatha, “that the cook is also a Spark, and that, as far as we can tell, the number of explosions coming from the kitchen doesn't correlate in any significant way with the quality of the food.”

They placed their orders, and while waiting for the food, Master Basmandi provided them with some fresh paper for writing. These new pages passed between the Heterodyne boys, Klaus and Agatha as they brainstormed, adding their own suggestions and building upon each other's ideas. It was a pleasant back-and-forth, an invigorating mental exercise for everyone involved, and Agatha found that the situation didn't feel as strange as it ought to. They were each some of the brightest Sparks of their generation, for all that Agatha belonged to a completely different one. It was a good ice-breaker, except perhaps for Krosp, who occasionally yowled about being hungry.

The food arrived carried by a half-cart clank, and they had to scramble to remove their notes as the clank piled trays and dishes upon the table top. Krosp took his food down under the table, where he felt more comfortable eating without having to listen to any more Spark prattle.

The table grew quiet for a few minutes, as everyone tucked into their food, and no wonder, because it was one of the most delicious meals Agatha had ever eaten. Granted, she hadn't eaten anything all day and hunger probably had a lot to do with that assessment, but everybody else seemed to be enjoying themselves just as much.

Eventually, though, the conversation picked up again.

Bill and Barry informed Klaus about the monster's newly discovered ability of teleportation.

“That's troubling,” Klaus said. “I thought we'd accounted for everything the creature assimilated from the University labs.”

“You think someone at the University was keeping some sort of... teleportation machine under wraps?” Bill asked, gesturing vaguely with his fork.

“It's the likely explanation, isn't it?” Klaus said. “Otherwise, it's not an ability consistent with any of the others the creature has displayed so far.”

“You mean to say that thing rampaged through University grounds, as well?” Agatha asked.

“It's where it first appeared, as far as we can tell,” Klaus said. “Some sort of experiment gone wrong.”

“It crashed its way out of the labs and disappeared mysteriously,” Barry said. “That was almost a week ago. Since then, it's turned up twice, including today.”

“It did take us by surprise a bit today,” Bill said, “but hopefully this,” he tapped the paper they'd been working on, “is going to help us flip the tables on it.”

“We really do need to get that monster off the streets soon,” Bill sighed. “Doctor Beetle's been breathing down our necks since this entire thing started.”

“It probably doesn't help,” Klaus said, “that you two show up wherever something goes wrong. It does tend to look a bit suspicious.”

“You're usually with us too, though!” Barry said.

“But I'm not the one Doctor Beetle has been itching to expel,” Klaus retorted.

Agatha looked between them, somewhat surprised by this turn in the conversation.

“Doctor Beetle?” she asked.

“Tarsus Beetle, one of our professors from the University,” Bill explained. “The Tyrant of Beetleburg's son. He's had it in for us since the day we arrived.”

“Well, we probably bear _some_ responsibility for that,” Barry muttered.

“It wasn't like I did it on purpose!” Bill said, throwing his hands up. “He's very short, I didn't see him over the clank controls!”

“Yes,” Klaus said, “and if you hadn't said that last part to his face, he might have been more open to accepting your apology.”

Bill pouted theatrically.

Agatha pressed her hand against her mouth, unsure if she was hiding a smile or simply appalled. She remembered how sensitive Doctor Beetle could sometimes be about his height, and there was something amusing about the thought that the relationship between the Heterodyne Boys and Doctor Beetle had started out as something resembling the relationship Agatha had had with Merlot. This wasn't something the Heterodyne Boys novels ever mentioned.

This interesting diversion was cut short by a loud bang and crash.

A man wearing a power armor tore through the door, pulling out half the door frame as he did.

“Rizmo Basmandi!” the armored man screeched, his voice laced with the harmonics of a Spark.

Master Basmandi attempted to turn around and run, but in two steps, the Spark was upon him, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt and lifting him into the air.

“Remember me, Basmandi?” the Spark screamed, all rage and spittle. “I bet you thought you'd never see me again! Well, who is the bigger fool now?” And he shook Master Basmandi like a rag doll.

Bill, Barry and Klaus rose from their seats at the same time, but Agatha was already out and halfway across the room by that point.

“Ah, Agatha--” Bill began, and looked around the table at his companions. “We're... not just going to let her go alone...?”

Krosp re-emerged from under the table, only to plunk himself in her seat and poach Agatha's leftover food.

“I don't think you need to worry,” Krosp said, and looked over at the rampaging Spark. “Granted, it's an incredibly uneven fight, but she's probably not going to injure him _too_ badly. She's soft like that.” And then he stripped the meat off a chicken leg in one smooth bite.

Krosp was so casual about all of this, that the three of them glances at each other uncertainly, before looking over at Agatha to see what would happen.

By that point, Agatha had walked up right to the troublemaker.

“Say, is that a late Vauban variant battle armor with an internally seamed power source?” she asked the Spark.

“Uh—yes,” the Spark replied, his attention shifting from Basmandi. “Yes it is!”

“Great,” Agatha said, “just checking.”

She reached to the nearest table and plucked a stein of beer right out of someone's hand. There was an indignant “hey!” in response, but Agatha ignored it and upended the stein over the Spark's head, drenching him in beer.

“What--” the Spark started, but by that point, the beer had seeped down into his armor, and he was cut off as it short-circuited and electrocuted him.

Master Basmandi was dropped unceremoniously to the floor, and had to dodge as the armored Spark fell over as well and almost crushed him.

There was a disappointed murmur around the room—everybody had been prepared for an interesting show—but Master Basmandi jumped to his feet and shook Agatha's hand gratefully.

“Oh, thank goodness!” Master Basmandi was saying. “I don't know what I would have done without you, Miss Clay. Every single one of these jackals would just sat there, watched me be torn apart and done nothing about it!”

He gestured around the room, glaring at his customers. All the Sparks around him developed a sudden interest in their food or their notes, and also a selective case of deafness.

(“But-- _we_ would have done something!” Bill sputtered.

“To be fair, our solution probably wouldn't have involved beer,” Barry said.

“But now we'll _never_ know!” Bill retorted.)

Agatha handed the stein back to its owner, who looked crestfallen at its emptiness.

“Does this happen often?” she asked.

Master Basmandi tapped his fingers together, little finger to index in increasingly rapid rhythm, like a distressed millipede. He avoided Agatha's gaze.

“Ever since our last bouncer quit,” he said, glaring down at the unconscious Spark, “I've been having difficulty keeping some of the customers in line.”

“Well, he didn't look so hard to handle,” Agatha said. “If you're hiring a bouncer, I _am_ in need of food and board--”

“Wages too, of course,” Krosp interrupted, appearing next to Agatha, “in addition to food and board. And even then, for such quality worker as Miss Clay, it'd be a steal.”

“Oh-- yes,” Agatha agreed. Period-relevant money would be a definite bonus, since they didn't know how long they'd be here. “And Krosp can work on the same terms, too.”

Krosp wasn't too happy with that last proposition, but he presented a united front for the purpose of negotiations.

“And what is it that your-- what is it that he can do?” Master Basmandi asked, looking down at Krosp.

“Well, he's a cat...” Agatha said.

“Ah, of course!” Master Basmandi said, something apparently occurring to him. “The larders have been lousy with mimmoths lately. Good idea, Miss Clay.”

“Thanks,” Agatha said faintly, just barely refraining from warning Master Basmandi that if he let Krosp into the larders, more than just mimmoths were going to get eaten.

Krosp wasn't helping Agatha's peace of mind with the way he was licking his lips in anticipation.

At any rate, it was with a renewed sense of optimism that Agatha slipped back into her seat, and the planning continued well into the night.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The Bishop Inn" is a bit of pun. In Romanian, the bishop in chess is called "nebun", which literally translates to "madman". So the name of the establishment is basically "The Madman's Inn", because Rizmo Basmandi believes in truth in advertising.
> 
> (The words for madboy/madgirl in Romanian would most likely be trăznit/trăznită, because it means both "struck by lightning" and, to put it politely, "eccentric".)


	3. Work Schedule

Agatha was woken by a persistent tapping on her forehead. She cracked open an eye to see Krosp, perched on the edge of her bed, looking down at her. His paw was still upraised, ready to poke at her again.

“If you sleep any longer, you're going to miss breakfast,” Krosp informed her. “And the cook isn't exactly the accommodating type.”

Agatha had a moment of confusion—the cooks at Castle Heterodyne were accommodating to the point of zealotry—before she remembered where (and most importantly when) she was.

She rose from the narrow uncomfortable bed and looked around the room. It was, rather remarkably, even smaller than she remembered it being from last night. Cheerful sunlight poured in through the tiny window, illuminating the thick curtain of dust in the air. Master Basmandi didn't believe in wasting one of his good rooms on someone once they'd made the transition from 'customer' to 'employee'. At least it was better than sleeping in the stables, though considering the bed was straw, the only functional difference was in smell.

Agatha rubbed her eyes. She was up late the night before, until nearly morning. She recalled dimly that the tavern was almost empty by the time Bill, Barry and Klaus finally took their leave, promising to contact her as soon as they got supplies together and found a workspace.

Agatha washed up—the room also had a basin crammed in a corner, on top of a rickety old chair—and dressed, before slipping out for breakfast.

She could have found the kitchen by smell alone, even if she hadn't been shown where it was the night before. Pots were steaming on the stoves, and complicated devices which hung on the walls, holding an assortment of cutlery and thermometers, would extend metallic arms at regular intervals to stir or adjust temperatures.

This was the domain of Smaragda Basmandi, whose exact relation to Rizmo Basmandi was still unclear to Agatha. Whether she was his wife, his sister or some other female relative, she was, at any rate, a dour-faced woman with deep frown lines around her mouth.

“Good morning, Mistress Basmandi,” Agatha said.

Mistress Basmandi turned, holding a spoon the way other Sparks might wield a weapon, and set her fugue-fevered gaze upon Agatha accusingly.

“You!” she said, and turned to fill her spoon with the contents of a pot. “Taste this!”

Agatha obliged, even though the liquid was a bit too hot. But once it finished burning the inside of her mouth, she had to admit the aftertaste was pure bliss on the palate.

“It's amazing,” Agatha said.

Mistress Basmandi nodded approvingly, and then started running an impromptu medical examination, checking Agatha's pulse, her breathing, her throat.

“Do you remember your name?” Mistress Basmandi asked. Yes, Agatha did. “The date?” Yes, that too. “Where you are?” The kitchen of the Bishop Inn, Beetleburg. “Good, good! I see I've worked out most of the kinks in this batch. I was afraid I'd watered it down too much.”

Well, that explained a lot. But Agatha felt amazingly alive, and even if it was just a side effect of some Sparky cuisine, at least this time it didn't involve getting hit with a pie to the face.

After that brief interlude, Agatha was relegated to a table in the corner to eat her breakfast, which was every bit as delicious as the rest of Mistress Basmandi's cooking, if not quite as potent in its effects. She was also firmly instructed not to speak, move, chew too loudly or so much as look around the kitchen, lest she be thrown out and barred from eating at the inn ever again. Agatha thought that was a bit harsh, but complied. Mistress Basmandi then proceeded to ignore Agatha, and ran around the room doing some rather arcane things to a side of beef.

Agatha finished eating and departed quietly as Mistress Basmandi started cackling over a pot of noodles.

The inn was quiet, and from what Agatha observed by a quick glance around the room, breakfast was not a popular meal with the clientele, perhaps because they were inclined towards working through the night until they collapsed in exhaustion and not getting up again until noon.

Master Basmandi was working on something behind the bar. Agatha glimpsed tubes and wires before he closed a panel, glaring possessively.

“Since you're in charge of security,” he said, “I suppose you must familiarize yourself with the Dissuader.”

He placed a heavy but battered shoulder cannon on top of the bar.

“It has come in handy a great many times,” Master Basmandi assured her. “If it jams, feel free to use it as a blunt instrument.”

It was visibly old, and someone had been taking the blunt instrument advice to heart, judging by all its dents. Master Basmandi left to do whatever it was he did, and Agatha sat at the bar, in the empty tavern, and opened up the Dissuader to have a look at its innards. 'A look' soon turned into a tinkering session.

Krosp slunk in after a while, and climbed on a stool next to her.

“So what have you found out about Master Basmandi?” Agatha asked, not taking her eyes away from her work.

“He spends a great deal of time copying things off the blackboards before he erases them,” Krosp said.

“Well, they're his blackboards, and copying things isn't a crime.”

“I didn't think anything of it either, except when he noticed I saw him, he was suddenly very anxious about it and chased me off with a broom.” Krosp folded his arms with a disgusted huff.

Agatha took note of that, but didn't comment.

“The man who tried to kill him last night--” she said instead.

“Ah, him. Basmandi had him hauled off by the Constabulary before he regained consciousness.”

“Well, if we find what jar they've put him in, we're going to have some questions for him. Anything else?”

“Just one thing,” Krosp said. “Klaus Wulfenbach is heading this way.”

Agatha looked at Krosp, and then twisted to look over her shoulder. Klaus was—not sneaking up on her, exactly, but by the looks of it, he hadn't counted on Agatha noticing him just yet.

“Good morning, Miss Clay,” he said, walking up to her and peering at the disassembled gun. “Early morning work session?”

“Good morning,” Agatha replied. “Yes, you could say so.”

“That's the Dissuader,” Klaus remarked. “You're making modifications?”

“Oh, yes,” Agatha said, at a bit of a loss. But at least this was a conversation topic that was unlikely to be laden with secret double meanings. “I checked, and it seems it only had one setting.”

“Yes, the mule-kick,” Klaus said.

“...Mule-kick,” Agatha repeated flatly.

“I'm told it sounds a bit more intimidating if you've actually been kicked by a mule before,” Klaus said, with the air of someone who is only relaying facts of which he has no personal knowledge, and no inclination towards knowing personally either. “It stimulates nerve endings directly. The physical effects are negligible, but when subject to a blast from the Dissuader, there is a feeling similar to being struck very hard.”

“Right,” Agatha said. “Anyway, I put in a few more useful features...”

She began pointing out the modifications she made, as Klaus watched with rapt attention. He only listened quietly at first, but as she went into detail, he began looking increasingly concerned.

“Miss Clay, if what you're describing is correct, you've given the Dissuader a death setting,” he said. “Possibly _several_.”

“It's not a _death_ setting,” Agath said, rolling her eyes. “Not unless you actually use it on people. And besides, it isn't like I took out the kiddie setting, I just added a few more bells and whistles.” Though admittedly, perhaps over the past few years, Mechanicsburg had given her some strange expectations about the potency of bells. But she wasn't going to admit that part out loud.

“Miss Clay,” Klaus said, his face going through various contortions of worry, “the Dissuader is meant to stun or incapacitate rowdy patrons. Master Basmandi would not be pleased if you incinerated his paying customers, but he would be far less pleased if you also damaged his property in the process.”

Agatha thought about this for a moment.

“But if the next guy to storm in here ready to kill Master Basmandi has a better armor--” she started.

“Miss Clay,” Klaus said again, in the kind of tone of voice that he would use on countless maniacal geniuses in another life. It was one part forbidding and two parts pure exasperation.

“Fine,” she sighed. “I'll take out the highest settings. But I'm leaving in all the non-fatal ones!”

She started modifying the gun again.

“I don't see what the big deal is,” she muttered. “Even the mule setting can be deadly, if you use it right.”

“The mule-kick,” Klaus corrected automatically. “And I'm frankly a bit concerned that you've actually given the matter some thought.” He paused for a long stretch, before his curiosity won out. “ _How_ could the mule-kick be fatal? It was designed with the precisely opposite goal in mind.”

“So are butter knives,” Krosp muttered, “but you can still gut someone with one if you're motivated enough.”

Klaus looked from Krosp to Agatha, alarmed.

“Krosp!” Agatha said, giving him a mildly chiding look. “Don't worry,” she then assured Klaus, “He doesn't even use cutlery.” With a final click, she closed up the Dissuader. “There. Took out the frying beam, just for you.”

“Thank you, I suppose,” Klaus said drily.

“Left in all the ones weaker than the mule-kick, though,” she said, and closed up the gun.

“...I see.” Klaus blinked.

“I like having options,” Agatha said, turning in her seat and staring down Klaus. “A variety of them, if possible.”

This would have never worked on old Baron Wulfenbach, but young Klaus was a different story. He looked adequately stared down.

“I'm sorry for doubting your judgment, Miss Clay,” he said, averting his gaze. “But you _are_ a Spark.”

Agatha sighed. He did have a point.

“I know,” she said, not all that begrudgingly. “Why are you here?”

“Ah,” Klaus reached into his coat and took out a few crumpled sheets of paper, passing them to Agatha. “Bill and Barry decided to get started right away on this design.”

Agatha recognized the blueprints they'd all been working on the night before, with a few more modifications sketched in.

“They managed to, shall we say, borrow one of the University labs.” Klaus paused for a second, frowning in thought. “I'm sorry, I made that sound ominous. I meant that they can be very persuasive. ...No, that still sounds like a euphemism.”

Agatha snorted in laughter.

“I get what you mean,” she said.

“They were very polite,” Klaus said quickly. “No threats at all and they used the word 'please'.”

“Yes, alright.”

“I'm sorry. They're Heterodynes. People tend to assume...” Klaus trailed off and shrugged.

Agatha nodded in understanding.

“Oh, so you came to get me,” Agatha said. “Have any of you eaten breakfast, or did you just wake up and get straight to work?”

“We thought we'd just have a long lunch instead,” Klaus shrugged.

“Tsk,” Agatha said, because she knew that decision would turn into 'we'll just have a big dinner' and then 'a late supper' and soon enough, a day would pass without any of them getting to eat. “Hold on, I'll be right back.”

She went back to the kitchen, leaving Krosp and Klaus alone. A tense few seconds passed as Krosp eyeballed Klaus and Klaus bore the scrutiny in silence.

Finally, Krosp folded his arms and leaned back.

“So,” Krosp said, “what's Basmandi's deal, anyway?”

Klaus showed to sign of surprise at the question. At most, he seemed relieved that the awkward silence ended.

“I believe Master Basmandi was once described as a 'lovable scoundrel' in his youth,” Klaus said. “He attended the University for many, many years. Never graduated, but he seems to have done well for himself regardless.” Klaus looked around the room. “Unfairly well, according to some, but tongues will flap, I suppose.”

“Is that so?”

“Rumor has it he left the University under contentious circumstances.”

“And he's a Spark?”

“A minor one,” Klaus confirmed.

“Hence the contentious circumstances?”

“It was some time ago, and apparently it wasn't a big enough scandal to warrant remembering. But no, the impression I get is that it was something much pettier. Not that Sparks can't be petty enough, but...” Klaus shrugged very slightly.

Krosp hummed thoughtfully.

“Well,” Krosp said, “I should get down to the larder. Earn my keep, as it were.” He patted his stomach with a satisfied smile, and then hopped down from the stool, ambling away.

Klaus waited alone until Agatha returned, carrying an obscenely large basket.

“Good news, Mistress Basmandi had a bit extra food lying around,” she announced. There was a kitchen towel covering the basket, but Agatha pulled it back to reveal the bounty inside.

“She _gave_ you all that?” Klaus asked, staring at all the food. This wasn't just 'a bit extra', this was a feast all by itself.

“Perks of the job,” Agatha said.

“She wouldn't even let me into the kitchen,” Klaus frowned.

“Of course not. No patrons allowed in the kitchen,” Agatha said.

“Well, this should be enough for everyone. I'm glad you thought of Bill and Barry, as well.”

“Of course I did,” Agatha said. “They're growing boys, they need to eat.” After saying this, she frowned a bit, perturbed.

“Miss Clay...?” Klaus asked gently, seeing her expression.

“Oh. Sorry, I just sounded like my mother for a second there,” Agatha admitted sheepishly. It was the kind of thing Lilith would say as she ladled second servings onto Agatha's plate. _You're a growing girl, you need to eat_. She probably said the same thing to Maxinia, now.

Klaus grinned widely, and he looked so friendly that Agatha was disarmed. She could see the resemblance to Gil more clearly in that grin.

“We should go,” she said.

 

* * *

 

Klaus insisted on carrying the basket, even though Agatha assured him she was perfectly capable of doing that herself. (“I'm sure you are, Miss Clay, but _I'd_ feel bad.”)

The walk towards the University was leisurely, at least. It was sunny, the streets weren't too crowded. They walked in silence, which suited Agatha just fine. She had nothing to share.

“Miss Clay,” Klaus said at one point (and Agatha considered telling him to call her by her first name, but couldn't quite make herself do it), “I'm rather surprised by how well you're taking the situation.”

“Well, it's hardly the first monster I've faced,” she said.

“That is... also good to know. But I meant Bill and Barry,” Klaus admitted. “Most people are extremely leery of them, especially at first. You seem at ease around them.”

“So do you,” Agatha replied.

“Ah-- yes, I suppose I am,” Klaus said. “But I've known them for a year now. You only just met them last night, and at no point did you seem worried.”

“Maybe I just hide it well,” Agatha said.

“Regardless, you agreed to go to an unknown location with a couple of Heterodynes you'd just met,” Klaus said flatly. “That is not exactly proof of sound judgment, no matter how harmless the Heterodynes in question may have seemed.”

“You don't have to worry about my judgment,” she said, hackles rising.

“It's actually your intentions I worry about.”

Agatha blinked, trying to figure out what he meant.

“I checked the student rolls this morning, and I couldn't find your name on any document going back two decades,” Klaus said. “You said you were a student, yes?”

“I didn't say it was at TPU,” Agatha said.

“And yet, you've been leading the way since we left the inn.”

Agatha stopped in her tracks, and skewered Klaus with a look. He wasn't worried for her, he was _suspicious_ of her. This was familiar ground, at least.

“Alright,” she said, “state your accusations clearly.”

“I have no accusation,” Klaus replied calmly. “Maybe just some questions.”

“Let's hear them.”

“Very well.” Klaus nodded. “Are you some kind of criminal?” he asked.

“No!” Agatha replied, mostly offended by how mundane that accusation sounded.

“Are you looking for retribution against the Heterodyne family?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Do you have anything to do with the monster?”

“No.”

“But you're hiding something.”

Agatha sighed.

“I'm hiding a lot of things,” she said. “It's nothing against you, or the Heterodyne Boys, but I have things I'm just not going to share because, quite frankly, they're none of your business.”

Klaus watched her intensely for a few moments, as if weighing her every word, then nodded in acceptance.

“Very well,” Klaus said, and gestured for them to continue.

They walked for a bit more, still a bit tense with each other.

“Heterodyne Boys,” Klaus said at one point, sounding amused. “I don't think I've ever heard someone refer to them quite like that.”

Agatha was quietly astounded for a few moments. No, maybe he hadn't. It was still early in the timeline, it would have probably been a few more years before they became notorious enough and that particular phrase was coined.

“Well, they're Heterodynes, and they're still boys,” she said reasonably.

“I think most people don't notice that second part for the first,” Klaus said.

 

* * *

 

The laboratory was abuzz with activity—literally, with Bill and Barry heterodyning in counterpoint with each other. They also managed to fill up all the workspace despite being just two people. They flitted from place to place, their hands blurs as they built.

Bill was up on a scaffolding when he noticed Klaus and Agatha in the doorway.

“You're here!” he called out happily. He was down on the ground in just two athletic leaps.

“Bill, we've talked about ladders,” Klaus chided amicably.

“Ladders are too slow,” Bill replied, grinning. “Oh! Unless I _build_ a faster ladder--”

“What's in the basket?” Barry asked, approaching in a much more sedate manner than his brother, and wiping his hands with a rag.

Klaus removed the kitchen towel from the basket. Bill and Barry leaned over, their nostrils flaring.

“We were... just about to take a break,” Bill said, completely enthralled by the smells and sights before him.

“You have Miss Clay to thank for this,” Klaus said. “And Mistress Basmandi, of course.”

Bill and Barry beamed at Agatha and started talking at the same time, thanking her.

“Yes, well, I heard you didn't eat breakfast,” Agatha said, trying to look serious and disapproving, but finding their smiles too infectious.

While the basket was unpacked and its contents dug into with appetite befitting growing young Sparks, Agatha went around the lab to see what they'd done so far.

She figured out the modifications they made easily, and shouted a question over to them once in a while when she came across anything tricky. Either Bill or Barry would answer her with full mouths or in between bites, but if they made any move to wander over to Agatha, she would wave them off, and Klaus would firmly press a hand on their shoulders and make them sit back down to eat.

The device, a large cage-like contraption meant to encase the monster and disable its powers, was still in pieces, several of its components needing to be reconciled.

It was an interesting puzzle to Agatha. Attach one piece to another, and it would cancel out the effects of a third. Attach them in a different way, and a completely different effect than the one intended would be achieved. The trick, she found, was to attach two pieces which canceled each other's unwanted side-effects while not intruding on each other's intended functions.

She had a viable configuration going by the time Bill, Barry and Klaus finished eating and drifted over.

“Agatha! You solved it!” Bill exclaimed, bouncing on the balls of his feet with excitement. “You're brilliant!”

“You did most of the work,” she said, taking a step back to look at the end result.

“But you _made it_ work,” Barry added, grinning widely.

“We won't actually know if I did that until we test it,” Agatha said.

“I have an idea where we could do that,” Klaus said.

 

 


End file.
